Junehill, Owl and a Green Dog, Too

Thursday, July 19, 2007

My sister, who went to Wellesley, recently received a birthday card from Hillary Clinton, despite the fact that they did not know each other in college. (See my political blog at www.huffingtonpost.com for the full story.*) This card, its "hand-written" message done by auto-pen, and obviously sent by the fundraising arm of the Clinton campaign, because Hillary doesn't know my sister from Eve, reminds me of my Uncle Logan and his little collection of such cards.

Logan Mooney, my maternal grandmother's son by her first marriage, was proud to be the grandson of C.P.J. Mooney. During my childhood, I found my uncle tiresome--for many reasons, not least of which was his constant chatter about C.P.J. Mooney. At the time, I could have been less interested. Now, of course, I wish I had listened. Few of you, dear readers, unless you are newspaper reporters, will have heard of C.P.J. Mooney--and there's a caution here about fame and fortune. Charles Patrick Joseph Mooney was the finest political figure west Tennessee ever produced (although, like many prominent Tennesseans, he was born elsewhere), for he was the muckraking newspaper editor who broke the power of the Klan in the state. Mooney and the Memphis Commercial Appeal won a Pulitzer for their efforts in 1923, and Mooney himself died three years later, at work, at his desk. As one of his friends in the newsroom said, Mooney "rode the owl home at three in the morning," for his work was his life. Despite his trouncing the Klan, Mooney died frustrated, for he had had no such success in exposing the various corruptions in the political machine of E.H. Crump, who was the Boss of Memphis then and would be for decades to come.

Not surprisingly, C.P.J. Mooney's family life suffered. His son Hugh, my uncle's father, was a troubled man, eventually institutionalized (back in the day when this was legally possible). Therefore, my uncle hardly knew his father or his grandfather, for he was only eight when C.P.J. Mooney died. His mother married again, this time to a man (Watkins Overton, my grandfather) who would eventually hold the record as longest-serving Memphis mayor. With his mother and step-father often away on the campaign trail, Logan was sent off to school. In family movies from the 1920's, and in newsreels of the period (my mother and her siblings were the ribbon-cutters of choice for the city), Logan is always standing off to the side, looking ill-at-ease.

When Uncle Logan was a teenager, my grandparents divorced. My grandfather got custody of his three children (a political story for another day); my grandmother kept Logan, who lived with her for the rest of his life. He had grown into the kind of man Southerners called "nervous." Too nervous to hold down a job, people said. Eventually, Uncle Logan got a patronage job in shipping on the Mississippi. I remember my grandmother saying nights that Logan was going down to the river to "meet the barge." He had three pleasures in life: his CB radio, his pride in his grandfather, and his five nieces.

I'm sorry to say that my sisters and I did not always reciprocate the affection. Uncle Logan dropped by my parents' house every afternoon, when he knew we would be home from school. He would rap on the sliding glass door in back; then he would sing and snap his fingers in time to a ditty he had made up: "Julia Bird!Julia Bird! Off we go to Gatlinburg!" The full story of the slant rhyme is much too much--suffice it to say that Julia among us sisters was Logan's favorite. In return, we called him Uncle Noney-Bird. And often we weren't very nice.

As for Uncle Logan's pride in his grandfather, it found its expression in the wall space of carefully-framed cards like the one Hillary Clinton sent my sister. Uncle Logan's cards were from FDR, JFK, and William Randolph Hearst. His family name made Uncle Logan a place on the card lists of the politically-powerful. Childlike to the day he died, Uncle Logan felt that the cards gave him a special connection to Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Hearst. Often at Grandmother's house I had to suffer through a visit to the card wall. From the time I was quite young, seven or eight, I intuited that these famous men did not know my uncle, even as Logan himself was quite sure they did. Now I understand that these cards gave him a sense of self-worth and dignity. Funny thing--not a year goes by that my sisters and I don't think often and fondly of Uncle Logan and miss him dearly. In our loss, I suppose, is his true worth.

*In a few days, I will have figured out my URL for The Huffington Post. For now, you can access my political blog by going to www.huffingtonpost.com, clicking on blogs, and choosing Off the Bus. You will find me among the Off the Bus bloggers. Alternately, you can click on the list of bloggers, either click on F or scroll down, and find me, Mayhill Fowler.

Note: I will be back to Middle East blogging in a few days, after I get the kinks worked out of the HP blog. Have much to say about Fatah and Hamas.

Friday, July 13, 2007

Flopped out in the Rio Grande Valley, nursing a cold, I've been reading Carl Bernstein's new biography of Hillary Clinton, trying to get a better sense of a woman I might well vote for come November 2008. Right off let me say that Bernstein provides a good read--not just a page-turner but a nuanced portrait. The Clintons' unhappiness with the book shows more than anything how the space inhabited by the famous and powerful over time comes to be shut off from the rest of the world, like a little terrarium under a glass bell. For the Clintons should be pleased. Bernstein's Hillary is passionate, conflicted, idealistic and pragmatic in equal measure. Yes, she has faults, she makes mistakes--but who doesn't? If Bernstein had meant his biography to flatter, the book wouldn't be worth beach time because any reader with a grain of sense would know it wasn't true.

One small section of the Hillary biography--her undergraduate years at Wellesley--I feel competent to judge, because I was not so far away at Vassar, '64-'68, and because two of my sisters were at Wellesley the same time as Hillary. For the most part, Carl Bernstein gets it right. Only a few of the supporting details are wrong, and I suppose we shouldn't expect a twenty-something research assistant to know that (1) when Robert Reich first met Hillary in 1965, he is mis-remembering that she was wearing bell bottoms, which weren't worn by hippies until the late sixties and taken up by other women in the early seventies; (2) the birth control pill was not "easily available" for Hillary and her new boyfriend David Rupert in the summer of 1968 (appointment with ob/gyn off-campus required, and then, given the patriarchy of the profession, convincing sometimes needed); (3) pass/fail grading and inter-disciplinary majors were rising as dress codes and parietals were falling everywhere in the Ivy League, so it is misleading to suggest, as Bernstein does, that Hillary Rodham single-handedly brought these changes to pass at Wellesley.

But this is nitpicking. One of the best things about A Woman in Charge is that Bernstein lays out a strong case for Hillary's devout Methodist faith. Beginning in high school, and certainly at Wellesley, Hillary's Methodism was a social gospel engaged in civil rights and the anti-war movement. Not surprisingly, for young people often forsake the stricter tenets of their religion only to return to them later in life (certainly that was my path), Hillary Rodham's college (and law school) religious practice did not include chastity. Hillary had two serious college boyfriends with whom she lived for short periods of time; once she met Bill Clinton, she lived on and off with him for several years, before finally deciding to marry him. At the time, such choices at such schools were the rule, not the exception. I suspect that Hillary, just as I, did not give much thought to the disjunction between her faith and her sexual life. It was the Age of Aquarius, the Advent of Free Love, and many of us twenty-somethings of the 60's and 70's were swept up.

At the same time, other Wellesley women (my sister was one) lived their Christian faith differently. My sister and her friends sought the meaning of the personal rather than the social gospel. Although, like Hillary, they did their share of Good Works in poor neighborhoods, they expressed their faith primarily in prayer, Bible study, and attempts at evangelism (the kind of naive outreach that my sister laughs about today). Of course, nobody--certainly not reporters, who were covering Woodstock and the San Francisco scene rather than Campus Crusade--realized that Inter-varsity Christian Fellowships, like the one at Wellesley, were equally significant, that one day they would grow into the American political force the media calls "the Religious Right."

Several comments occur to me here. First, the determination of my sister and her Wellesley friends 1966-1970 to love God, follow the Ten Commandments, and heed Jesus' Pentecostal injunction to tell the world about Him is the God-centered, top-down rather than pick-and-choose faith I wrote about in my previous blog. Secondly, Evangelical Christianity (a misnomer, because by definition all Christians are evangelicals) continues to shape society and politics, in a number of increasingly significant ways in this age of Islamic terrorism; on the other hand, some of the social gospel vision of the last century is history, and embarrassing history at that. We now know, for example, that much of the Black Panther movement that captured the imagination of Hillary and her Yale Law School classmates was a con, in which various black men played white middle class guilt so well that otherwise intelligent and educated people did not see that the men essentially were criminals.

It's always easier to spot an injustice in the distance than the wrong close-to-home. At Wellesley, Hillary was concerned, genuinely, admirably, with the plight of blacks in the South. However, committed Christian though she was, Hillary seems never to have used her prominence in student government to speak out against the cruel ways in which other Wellesley girls taunted my sister and her friends, who were known as "The God Squad." Focussed on bringing poor black girls to her school (I assume that Wellesley, like Vassar, already included well-to-do black students), Hillary didn't notice the scholarship students already there. My sisters were two such. At that time, young women on scholarship at Wellesley were required to do small jobs around campus. Poorer girls were further stigmatized by the jumble bin of used clothing put aside for them. I recall my family's feelings of humiliation about these ways in which my sisters were set apart. Here was an injustice right on campus that a would-be reformer such as Hillary Rodham could have tackled. But as far as the poor were concerned, Hillary had her sights set farther away.

The difference between the ways Hillary and my sister lived the Gospel at Wellesley was a small harbinger of the coming divide in our country on matters of faith. Calling herself an agnostic intellectual liberal while engaged in a serious correspondence on doctrinal matters of faith and grace with her Methodist youth minister back home, Wellesley Hillary was searching, like any college student. But here in her complicated and sophisticated system of belief, in her youth, was a part of her that would someday inspire uneasiness in more conventionally-oriented fellow Christians and give her such a polarizing persona.

A rapprochement is on the horizon, and Barack Obama is not the only Christian trying to bring it on. Just as conservative Christians (so-called--obviously, I don't like any of the media's nametags) have taken on new environmental responsibility, just as some Christians whose faith is traditionally Bible-centered are calling for a new war on poverty and reviving the activist faith of a half-century before, so Hillary Rodham Clinton herself has evolved. In the series of interviews with the Democratic presidential candidates on the subject of faith and politics, which appeared on CNN June 12 (see www.sojo.net for the full transcript), Hillary talked about her faith. "I come from a tradition that is perhaps a little too suspicious of people who wear their faith on their sleeves," she said. Despite a mention of the Pharisees, she came close to suggesting that she may have been wrong.

Thursday, July 5, 2007

Matthew Arnold's poem Dover Beach has spoken to educated people in the West about modern times. Writing in 1867, Arnold has long seemed to have the gift of poetic prophesy.

The Sea of FaithWas once, too, at the full, and round earth's shoreLay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.But now I only hearIts melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,Retreating, to the breathOf the night-wind, down the vast edges drearAnd naked shingles of the world.

Has any other poem, for more than a century, better encapsulated our society's moving away from the religious verities of our forebears and towards secularism? Arnold's verse has seemed as much a summing up for us as prophesy for him. Inherent to Arnold's choice of metaphor, however, is something upon which none of my teachers, not even in English graduate school, commented.

Even as the tide goes out, it comes back in.

And so, well before the end of the first decade in this new century, we see one of the major themes for this century: a rekindling of religious faith worldwide. One of the past century's assumptions, that with education and globalism people everywhere would become increasingly secular, has been proved false. Nowhere is this movement more obvious than in Islam. Whereas Islam used to be more a cultural than a religous force in parts of the Muslim world, today that world is changing. In both social subsets, like university students in Cairo, and in nations, like Turkey and Indonesia, people are more attentive to the dictates of their faith. Of course, the same forces are at work in Christianity. The growth of evangelical Protestantism in the U.S. and in Central America, the correspondent emergence of charismatic Catholicism, the legacy of Pope John Paul II, the rebirth of the Orthodox church in the states of the former Soviet Union, and the competition for converts between Christianity and Islam in Africa are shaping our world. Of course, there are parallels in Judaism, for which one need look no further than the growth of the Orthodox Bronx in New York.

But for all the rebirths in Christianity, it is the Muslim faith that will shape the world to come. Islam is the world's fastest growing religion, the world's fastest growing population. Within forty years, a majority of earth's people will be Muslim. Therefore, Islam--not Judaeo-Christian values, not the western Enlightenment, not American democracy--will mark some of the ways in which our grandchildren and great-grandchildren live. Future world cultures will be colored by Islam, in the way American popular music and movies and games infuse everything everywhere today.

Some of you, dear readers, don't want to read this. Some of you resist. You are alarmed. But I say to you: don't be. Despite the growing numbers of Islamic terrorists, despite the myriad ways in which various Muslim societies are growing darker--and indeed every day there is more disquieting news--good things are happening in Islam. You have to search online to find the good news. But the good news is there, and in its own quiet way, growing. I have pointed you towards some of that news in my Jordan blog, to some of the people, women in particular, who are risking their lives to find a way to practice their faith in the modern world.

There is an ongoing debate among Middle East scholars about a Reformation for Islam. Would it be good for Islam to have a realignment like the Protestant Reformation sparked by Martin Luther? Or is that a neo-colonialist imperative? It seems to me that such a debate is academic, for the Reformation has already begun. As Leila Ahmed said to the young Muslim women at the IWF Conference, "like me, you have been educated in the West. But unlike me, you are not staying in the West. You are taking what you have learned home with you; you are re-interpreting the Quran and sharia; you are going further than I ever dreamed." The paradox is that by re-thinking what it means to live life as a good Muslim, these women are strengthening the whole world of their religion.

So the "great war for civilisation" that Fisk and others envision is not really between Islam and the West, or between Islam and Judaism/Christianity. It is a war within Islam itself. Mostly, at the beginning of this century, we see the dark forces at work. To put it in neutral language, we see the push-back. When reading about suicide bombers and hate speech and honor killings, I don't usually respond so, I must confess. Indeed I often think of Martin Luther's great hymn of the Reformation. "And so our Ancient Foe, doth seek to work us woe/His craft and power are great/And armed with cruel hate, on Earth is not his Equal." As a Christian, of course, I believe that evil will not triumph, in the end.

In Jordan, I had a breakfast conversation that I've thought much about since. Amy and I, both of us from the San Francisco Bay area, were talking about religious tolerance among Californians. A good thing, we both agreed. Amy went on to say how great it is that many Californians are into Buddhism. I demurred, tentatively. And in the end, I demur even more. For in the West, even among conservative Christian and Jewish congregations, we now have "pick and choose" religion. It's a Build-A-Bear enterprise: from the elements of various faiths, choose what appeals to you and build your own religion--dare I say it, build your own God. For after all, none of the Buddhism-appreciative Californians Amy and I know are shaving their heads, picking up their staves and begging bowls and heading out into the world to search for divinity, in the true Buddhist way. In our time, we have come to the end of the journey on which the Reformation and the subsequent European Enlightenment have set us. Individual consciousness, human rights for the individual, the imperative that an individual should interpret Scripture as he or she sees fit--we have sought and found these good things, and they have carried us as far as they can. From the overweening sense of personal entitlement, from rationalizations of bad behavior, from the moral relativism that permeates western cultures, we can see that we have reached some kind of an end.

Islam--whether from necessity, as the world's most influential religion, or from divine purpose, as I believe--will take us on down the road. When my new Jordanian friend said that Islam is a perfect expression of human rights for women, I nodded politely, but I rolled my inner eye. Now I think I'm beginning to get it. Islam is not a religion built from the bottom up, as much of Christianity is today, from the bits and pieces of doctrine and revelation an individual finds congenial. Islam is a--maybe the--top-down faith. Worship God, in the spirit of the Quranic revelations; acknowledge God, and everything else follows. For a Muslim, submission to God, through the ritual of daily prayers, infuses everything. This is why so many Muslim women attest that Islam is good to women. God is good and all-powerful; His immanence givesmeaning to my world. In the well-lived Muslim life, this is complete truth. In everyday matters, of course, people often fail to live their faith. How twenty-first century Islam reconciles this dichotomy will determine much.

This is the end of my Jordan blog. I'll continue to write about Islam now and then. But it's on to the 2008 presidential race. Islam is the future--likely well past my lifetime--but for now American democracy is still a force to be reckoned with. So Junehill, Owl, and Green Dog will return to our political roots.

Friday, June 29, 2007

I knew little about the Middle East and Islam before I printed out the reading list for the IWF Conference. I take that back. When my daughter Caro and I went to Turkey two years ago, I did some reading for that trip. There I began to pursue an elusive subject that is becoming a bit of an obsession with me. Now I spend several hours a day online reading the Middle East news from sources large and small, trying to put together, just as if people and events were puzzle pieces, what's going on.

Each day begins with the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Reportage in hand--literally, for I clip and save articles--I move on to the Internet to try to make sense of the morning's content. The stories in these two good newspapers seldom cohere. One reason for the muddles--aside from reporters doing the best they can with the limited information and perspective countries without free speech offer--is the scattershot nature of the attention. When the war in Iraq is the only Middle East story that the Times covers every issue, and when the Times has an aversion today (a different situation forty years ago) to covering religion per se, it is hard to follow everything else that is going on not only in the Middle East but in the Islamic world at large.

The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture ofTolerance in Medieval Spain (2003)

5. John Esposito & John Voll

Makers of Contemporary Islam (2001)

Islam and Democracy: Religion, Identity & Conflict Resolution in the Muslim World

(1996)

6. Kamal S. Salibi

The Modern History of Jordan (1993)

To this list, so far I would add:

7. Robert D. KaplanThe Arabists (1993)

8. Karen ArmstrongMuhammad (1992)

9. Bernard LewisWhat Went Wrong? (2002)

10. Vartan GregorianIslam (2003)

11. Robert FiskThe Great War for Civilisation (2005)

12. The Quran

A few comments on the list: Leila Ahmed and Esposito/Voll I can't recommend highly enough. Dalacoura and El Fadl are difficult reading, but necessary for any pondering of Islam and Human Rights. Ornament of the World fills in the missing links for medieval French poetry. (For the first time, I understand the Roman de la Rose.) However, even as she explores the things medieval Judaism and Christianity took from Islam, Menocal does not put forward much, if any, influence in the other direction. Surely, this is significant, but Menocal does not explore the one-way-ness of the influence.

On the books I recommend: Kaplan's book is all-the-more revealing for being dated. For example, two of the Arabists Kaplan struggles to like (and almost but not quite succeeds) turn out to be prescient years before 9/11. More importantly, his book describes America's good relationship with Arabs in the Middle East pre-Israel. Kaplan doesn't make sense of how things went wrong after that, but he does describe Kissinger's crucial role in the change. To begin to understand how America went so wrong in the Middle East, Fisk is a good, if lengthy (over 800 pages) read. Despite the annoying title of his book, Fisk, a British journalist in the Middle East for forty years, witnessed many of the crucial events there. He covered the Civil War in Lebanon. He was the last western reporter out of Afghanistan. He knew Osama Bin Laden back in the day.

I now know enough to be able to disagree with Bernard Lewis. But still he is a seminal western scholar and a must-read. I now know enough to realize that Edward Said is, too. Orientalism is on my beside table. And, of course, we must read the Quran. So far, I have not found a good translation. (Arberry's on order. Will report back.) This situation would seem to bear out what people who know Arabic say--namely, that the Quran is untranslatable.

The Quran is not a narrative, like many books of the Bible. In fact, the book is not linear. It jumps around from "submissions" (prayers to Allah, many of them beautiful and more sophisticated than anything in the Bible) to specific injunctions about caring for orphans, dividing property, keeping sheep and cattle, settling disputes, husbands and wives, and other elements necessary for a cohesive society. Here the Quran reminds me of the Judaic laws in Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Surprisingly, much of the Quran is a commentary on Genesis, Exodus, and the Gospels. The commentary is general and therefore not particularly insightful. But, obviously, given the times in which we live, the holy book of Islam is a necessary read. Now that I think about it, the Bible is, too.

On the subject of popular literature and "first person" books with Middle East settings: Read the classics. Mafouz. Rushdie. Hikmet. Pamuk.

The only "less than the first rank" book I recommend is Acts of Faith by Philip Caputo. This novel, set in the Sudan during the first decade of civil war between North and South, beautifully if sadly sets forth why westerners and aid organizations, with the best of intentions, fail to do much about ethnic cleansing. Also, Caputo is the only novelist I know who inhabits the skin and soul of a Muslim jihadist character and makes him human and sympathetic. A literary achievement. (The book did win the Pulitzer Prize.)

If you read some of the books on the above lists, you will see why the following popular books are not-so-good:

1. Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks. A first-person account all-the-more scary because the author is a journalist, for heaven's sake. She of all people should be able to inhabit the skin and soul of a contemporary Muslim woman and understand why so many such women have taken up the veil. Brooks writes fatuously about King Hussein and Queen Noor: "Behind the king's resolve, I was sure I saw the queen's quiet influence at work, and his world view gradually becoming identical with hers." Read Leila Ahmed to understand the veil. Read Fisk to get the real story on King Hussein. Brooks's account could hardly be farther from the truth.

2. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. Generally speaking, if a book re-inforces impressions you already had about the Middle East, you should beware. As many Iranian women have pointed out, Nafisi indulges in easy stereotypes (the wife abuser, for example, whereas, as Ahmed says, the incidence of wife abuse is the same East and West). From Nafisi's book, a reader might assume all too-easily that for educated Iranian women novels originally written in English are their standard for literature, instead of the Persian writers who inhabit the current literary scene--women like Parsipur, Behbahani, and Danishvar. More importantly, it is all-too-easy to jump from an embrace of a writer's creation of imagination, here a reading group in Tehran, to an assumption that Iranian middle class women want a different society than the one they now have.

3. Kabul Beauty School by Deborah Rodriguez and Kristin Ohlson. Afghani women have already challenged the veracity of this "memoir." Now it seems likely that Ms. Rodriguez fabricated some, if not most, of her stories--always a warning sign when the publisher notes on the copyright page that "some personal, place and organization names have been changed, and some chronological details adjusted." This is another popular work that gives American readers what they already believe to be true.

Since I'm beginning to sound like the book police, I will moderate my comments on the last two bestsellers because both are well-written and, frankly, I enjoyed them. Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel is a compelling story of her Somali family and upbringing. Also, Ms. Ali makes clear why Holland and the rest of the EU are having second thoughts about their 14 million Muslim immigrants. On the other hand, even as we understand why Ms. Ali personally abhores Islam, her argument against the faith of her forebears does not withstand scrutiny. When she says that Islam is evil and perverting, for example, she does not account for the many fine people in the world who are Muslims and have good family lives within the Muslim faith. Again, I fear that she is "preaching to the choir" in much of her audience, who already are too disposed to demonize Islamists.

My last caveat is about Khaled Hussein's Kite Runner. He is a marvelous storyteller. In the end, however, his novel is not really about Afghanistan--it has a picturesque setting that happens to be Afghanistan. Hussein's sensibility is profoundly western in its appreciation of individuality, its vision of causality as a result of human choice, and its relegation of religion to the sidelines. If you want to read a novel with a non-western sensibility, read any of Orhan Pamuk's. Snow is my favorite.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

My friend Clare and I have been laying the groundwork for some Jordanian high school students to come over here to college. On the principle that the more positive interaction between East and West the better, I still believe in our plan, even though one of the assumptions impelling us has turned out to be false. For one thing, many Jordanian high schoolers don't need our help. In Amman, Jordan has six to eight private high schools, most with church origins but now secular, many offering the International Baccalaureate degree. Their graduates already go on to university in Europe, the U.K. and the U.S. Amman also has six or so good private Islamic high schools. Furthermore, King Abdullah has enticed the headmaster of Deerfield Academy, a top American prep school, to Deerfield's new partner school, The King's Academy in Amman. And finally, Amman has some good public high schools. I now realize that Clare and I had succumbed to a bit of a rescue fantasy, whereas in fact Jordan has the best educational system in the Middle East.

There are students in Jordan who could use our help, but we will not be able to help them. Among the million-or-so Iraqi refugees now in Jordan, surely there are teenagers, well-educated back home in Baghdad, who would love to go to college in the United States. Mostly, these young people have no educational future in Jordan, for several reasons. First of all, Jordan, overwhelmed by this latest influx of refugees, will not allow Iraqis into Jordanian public schools. And the security service is cracking down on Iraqi students who have been going to school illegally, sometimes with a school's tacit consent. Furthermore, Jordan has stopped issuing temporary visas to Iraqis and has begun enforcing the monetary penalties on overstaying the old visa's thirty-day limit. Without a valid visa, even a wealthy Iraqi child can no longer attend a private school in Jordan. To meet this crisis, two Virginia missionaries opened a school for Iraqi refugees in Amman. The Grace School could have been a conduit for Clare's and my efforts; however, for reasons unknown (but on which we can speculate) the Jordanian government closed the Grace School in April. Therefore, even before any consideration of the U.S. visa problems Jordanian-Iraqi students would have, Clare and I can not help out with this surely overwhelming need.

The educational situation in Jordan is a paradigm for the country itself. Places are not always what they seem--and especially at first glance to a tourist. On the one hand, with its well-educated and optimistic populace, Jordan should be a good candidate for the western business investment that the Jordanian IWF-ers, in hosting the conference, were hoping to promote. On the other hand, the government of King Abdullah may fall, as some western analysts predict, if and when the U.S. leaves Iraq. In this scenario, the influx of Iraqi refugees, and the Jordanian government's refusal to recognize them as such, are harbingers of upheaval to come.

The Jordanian women of the IWF, like many of their countrymen, want to bring to Jordan not only western business but also western tourists. Again, this is a two-sided situation. On the one hand, Jordan is a haven for tourists: friendly, clean, inexpensive, and full of interesting places to visit that are delightfully uncrowded. A woman can walk around Amman at night and know that she will not be accosted, scammed, cheated, robbed, or mugged. This is the Muslim way of life at its best--zero tolerance for thieves and utmost courtesy for guests. On the other hand, we know that there are fundamentalist jihadists and (potential) suicide bombers in Jordan, in the way that we don't know quite that there are any in the U.S. right now. Less than two years ago, Iraqi refugee jihadists blew themselves up in three of the western chain hotels in Amman: the Radisson, the Days Inn, and the Grand Hyatt, setting for the IWF Conference. Several western embassy and business folk have been murdered in the last few years. Therefore, an American in Jordan, like in Turkey, knows that something happening is all or nothing. This dual consciousness is a strange travelling companion.

There is also the matter of the constitutional monarchy and King Abdullah. The omnipresence of the king's image (photos of him everywhere) seems, on the one hand, to reflect his popularity among his subjects. On the other hand, his government, like so many Middle Eastern bureaucracies, is tainted. One of my new Jordanian acquaintances, referring obliquely to her government's corruption, asked me if there were corrupt officials in America. When I said that "yes, of course, human nature is the same everywhere, and it is the rule of law that helps us deal with it where I live," she was intrigued. Unfamiliar with the process of holding someone accountable, she asked me to go through our justice system step-by-step. My friend's circumlocutory appraisal of her government is borne out by the Jordanian blogosphere, home to comments--sometimes humorous, sometimes grim--about the king's revolving-door and therefore ineffectual cabinet.

While Clare and I were in Jordan, King Abdullah was working, as he had been for some time, on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. In fact, just as his country (without oil, or water reserves) is hoping to make its fortune as the regional middle-man, so Abdullah has staked his reputation and clout as peace broker. Since the IWF Conference, much has fallen apart. One minute all is quiet at the Allenby/Hussein Bridge, the major crossing between Jordan and Israel, in the West Bank. When Clare and I were near, Jordanians, with pride, pointed in the bridge's direction. Now, only weeks later, the U.S. State Department has warned Americans to stay away from the bridge. During my stay in Jordan, I wondered, in the back of my mind, if there was something more to King Abdullah's cancellation of a day trip to Ramallah in the West Bank than was reported. The Jordanian Times was torn between two stories: it was the weather; once airborne, the pilot realized the royal helicopter needed repair. Something didn't seem right. But what was I really seeing? Of course, now we know that Palestinian society was disintegrating, and as a consequence the King's day trip was just too dangerous.

The turnaround of Abdullah's helicopter and the turnabout with the Hussein Bridge show that the fortunes of Jordan could go either way, quickly. Thinking particularly of my new friends and acquaintances there, I hope that Jordan can maintain sovereignty and the middle way on which it has embarked. The risk is that Abdullah has staked too much on his relationship with the U.S. Human Rights Watch rumor has it that the new hillside headquarters of the Jordanian secret service is home-away-from-home for the C.I.A. Everything has a price--and our foreign aid budget for Jordan has quintupled over the last few years.

Rumor aside, Abdullah's political stance--moderating, mediating, secular, paying homage to western ways--is perceived as an American one. Abdullah does not seem to be the quintessential Arab his father was. King Hussein knew how to put on a redkaffiyeh and break bread in the eastern desert with his Bedouin constituents. Abdullah is less close to his nomadic roots. Despite the role he has taken on as peace broker, he does not have his father's masterful ability to balance his country between opposing forces. And now that Palestine has fallen apart, what will happen to Abdullah next door? Having stepped forward as a peace broker between his neighbors Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Abdullah is now weaker. Two days ago, the King of Jordan returned from Sharm El Sheik in Egypt much diminished, because EhudOlmert, Israel's prime minister, at the Sinai conference was unwilling to give Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority what he, presumably with the backing of Abdullah and Hosni Mubarak, came to the Red Sea to ask for. However, one would never know that Jordan's King Abdullah had suffered a setback, for the end of the Egyptian conference was quickly followed by a two-day visit of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah Ben Abdul Aziz to Jordan. Hundreds of Jordanians lined the streets of Amman to cheer the royal progress, wave flags, and feast on sheep and camel.

What am I really looking at? Like I said several months ago at the beginning of my blog, in politics I am at best a sceptic and at heart a pessimist. Therefore, I'm going back to Jordan soon, and on to Syria, while I can.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Questioning from both IWF-ers and panelists about the negativity of western media coverage on Islam and the Middle East threaded the conference, as my previous Jordan blogs show. Since my return, I've seen many example of this. The May/June issue of American Interest, for example, reviews four new books about Islam in America--all of which would seem to focus on terrorism. The reviewer likes American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of aReligion best. The author, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, organizes his book into seven chapters, each on a different American Muslim: KhaledAbou El Fadl, the UCLA professor who was a no-show at the conference, a feminist from Mumbai, a Lebanese Sufi, and four men with ties to Islamic terrorist organizations. Four out of seven with ties to terrorism? Is that balanced? What about a grocer in Houston? A Somali immigrant in Maine? An Iowa entrepreneur? An imam in Detroit who speaks for peace? A Jordanian exchange student at Westover High School? (The Ahliyyah School for Girls in Amman and Westover High School in Middlebury, Connecticut exchange students for a semester every year.)

Subtler negative coverage abounds. From the article "A New Cairo" by Christopher Dickey in the May/June issue of Departures: "Single-masted feluccas set sail in the twilight with families and lovers, some of the women wearing veils in that coquettish nod to Islamic modesty typical of Egypt, where the arts of seduction are older than the legends of Cleopatra." Haven't we had enough of fatuous orientalism? And amused condescension--as in the Wall Street Journal's front-page article (June 5) "For Jordanians, Shotgun Weddings Can Be a Problem." Out of all the interesting things going on in Jordan, over a three-month period the Journal chooses to cover King Abdullah's speech to the U.S. Congress (in an editorial called "Hashemite Hokum") and the Bedouin tradition of firing guns into the air as a way of celebrating weddings. The handful of deaths that occurs every year as a result says as much about Jordanian society as the handful of drownings every year in Yosemite says about ours.

Sometimes the problem is truth-in-balance, and here, as is often the case, the New York Times is an example. Although in the last week the Times has run several thoughtful retrospective pieces on the anniversary of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the paper's most prominent piece, showcased with a color drawing on the front page of the Sunday (June 10) Week in Review section, is "The Guidebook for Taking a Life." With its eye-catching format, the insouciance of its choice of bestseller terminology, this article (researched in Zarqa, Jordan, by the way) purports to set out the rules of jihad etiquette. Not only is this bit of journalism in questionable taste, lightly equating killing with social manners, but also it is false, for jihadists are not all on the same page when it comes to rules of engagement. This is an important issue, and underlying it is the opacity of the Quran, whose verses are open to very different interpretations. Instead of tackling this difficult topic, however, the New York Times opts for shock journalism, which, of course, draws in more readers.

These choices show how low our media has descended, even in arguably the two most prominent American newspapers. This corruption was also on display at the IWF Conference during our first lunch session. I had been looking forward to this program, which featured the U.S., Turkish, and Russian ambassadors to Jordan as panelists and RaghidaDergham as moderator. I shouldn't have been optimistic, however, because luncheon programs for ladies are often light fare, and male participants, like our ambassadors, usually pick up on the tone and deliver accordingly. Nevertheless, I was excited, because I had googled RaghidaDergham.Born in Beirut, a graduate of SUNYPlattsburgh, now a New Yorker, Ms. Dergham is a columnist for Al Hayat, the London-based Arabic daily paper, as well as an analyst for NBC/MSNBC, and a member of The Council on Foreign Relations. A frequent guest on t.v. and radio talk shows, she has won numerous awards in journalism. Something of a Lebanese Barbara Walters, Ms. Dergham has interviewed all the major players in Middle Eastern politics for the last quarter century.

Media stardom has gone to the head of RaghidaDergham. She wanted the IWF lunch session played her way and no other. Disingenuously, she began, "let's keep this off-the-record." In a room full of strangers armed with digital audio/video cameras and Blackberries? With me blogging? As if! As if the three ambassadors took her seriously for a moment! Quickly, Ms. Dergham moved in for the kill with the kind of pointed questions that twist any response before it is even made. But Ms. Dergham was not interested in an exploration of possibility and truth; she was prodding for the "gotcha" moment. She wanted to make the three gentlemen squirm. And, of course, as public servants the ambassadors were used to this verbal thrust-and-parry, with its overtones of gamesmanship and sexual titillation. (RaghidaDergham is a very attractive woman.) Resigned, the men offered anodyne remarks about politics in the Middle East, which gave us women of the conference nothing to ponder. Grim-faced, surrounded by the Jordanian security service, David Hale, the American ambassador to Jordan, departed the minute lunch broke.

Since RaghidaDergham can never return to Lebanon, where she is under indictment for treason (something about a public debate with an Israeli), I cut her some slack. I can not begin to imagine what it must be like never to be able to go home. But, I have to say, she is a real piece of work. As the lunch quickly ended, we ladies were surprised that the meal had been onlymezzes (appetizers). Later we found out that the waiters, trays aloft, lined up in the hall outside the ballroom, preparing to enter with our main courses, had been turned away. Word had come down from RaghidaDergham. She didn't like the clink of cutlery and the chink of china of competing with her own voice. Either the luncheon service came to a halt--or she would get up and leave. Now wouldn't that have been a shame?

Saturday, June 9, 2007

Here comes a break in my blog about Jordan, Islam, and the women's conference. I posted "Spoke-ified" on the afternoon of the conference's last day. That night our Jordanian hostesses treated us to a magnificent party at Kan Zaman, an Ottoman caravanserai that has been turned into a tourist restaurant-with-shops. We indulged in a final flurry of shopping, heaped plates of mezzes and shwarma, and dancing to the bagpipes. (I've since learned that the Arab Legion of the British Army introduced European music to its soldiers by setting up musical bands, and in 1929 bagpipes were incorporated into these bands. The bagpipes, which incidentally had been played in Persia thousands of years before they came to Scotland, were so popular in Trans-Jordan that the great-grandfather of the current King Abdullah had them played on his way to mosque every Friday.) Anyway, in honor of the occasion, the ladies of the IWF outdid themselves in ornament and dress.

An amusing and dramatic side-plot of the conference was the increasing display of jewelry from the Middle East. Every morning at breakfast I spotted new pieces on IWF-ers. One morning an American said that before her trip she had asked a friend who had traveled to Jordan what there was to buy. "Nothing," the friend had replied. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Jewelry, both costume and antique, silver and gold, is beautifully different and also inexpensive compared to what you find in the U.S. And the high-end clothing, such as the cross-stitched Bedouin jackets and the semi-sheer scarves and over-dresses made of camel's hair (not coarse, but soft and fine like silk), are lovely. Much of this clothing, especially hand-embroidered silk caftans, came out to Kan Zaman.

A coda to the evening is that the bus ride to Kan Zaman, on the outskirts of Amman, showed us the tight security I had been expecting and did not find at the conference. The attendees of the World Economic Forum were already arriving as we ladies were leaving, and the Jordanian army was out in force. (The forum was meeting at hotels along the Dead Sea, but many attendees were staying at hotels in Amman.) As we drove out of Amman, we saw a tank or police car parked athwart every side street. There were a couple of soldiers posted on every block. Every hill and hillock had its sniper. This display went on for miles and miles, presumably all the way to the airport.

Two days later, I was back in Rome--this time with my daughters, both of whom were suffering from jetlag and post-graduate school-year exhaustion. (Coincidentally, both Coco and Caro are getting their Ph.D.'s at Princeton--Mayhill Courtney in Russian history and Caroline in Byzantine/medieval art.) After a Fowler women weekend in the Eternal City, Coco flew off to Paris (treating herself because she just passed her orals) and Caro and I commenced a Toad's Wild Ride through Sicily. The ostensible reason for the trip was the medieval cloister at the Cathedral of Monreale outside Palermo, which Caro plans to write about in the coming year. But the real impetus, it seems to me, was Caro's love of the sun. We spent much of our week there checking out various beaches, and indeed we found a glorious one. Unfortunately, however, Sicily is still a bit internet-challenged, and it is only now, weeks later, that I can complete my thoughts about Jordan, Islam, and the Conference.

So I have two more postings: on the Middle East and the western media; and finally on what I have learned about Islam (and there I will include a list of the books I have found illuminating, the ones I have not, and the ones I have on my bedside table now, for I will pursue this subject further).

Next year Clare and I plan to return to Wadi Rumm; then I want to go on to Syria. Meanwhile it's back to American politics for Junehill, Owl and Green Dog. I did the Barack Obama Walk for Change this afternoon; I've been thinking about the "Faith Dialogue" that Jim Wallis persuaded CNN to host, with all the Democratic candidates. Watch for those next week.

Owl and Me

Blog Archive

Obamatized!

"'And when our [American] idealism spills into that kind of naivete [sense that we can remake the world] and an unwillingness to acknowledge history and the weight of other cultures, then we get ourselves into trouble.'" (interview with Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker 5/7/07)

"But over the long haul, I think we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people, and join a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy." (Barack Obama, keynote address at the Call for Renewal Building a Covenant conference, June 28, 2006, entire text on the Sojourners magazine website)

Threading the Niebuhrian Needle: "'So I asked, What do you take away from him [Niebuhr]?' 'I take away,' Mr. Obama answered in a rush of words, 'the compelling idea that there's serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn't use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away... the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naive idealism to bitter realism.'" (Thanks to David Brooks, NYT 4/26)

The Clothesline

American Idols Wear White - Blessed are the pure in . . . song?

Nancy Pelosi's headscarf - Middle Eastern silkworms, no doubt

Whatever

See my Clothesline, where some of the emperor's new clothes hang out to dry. Mullah Moments: our world through his eyes. Obamatized: I have to thank my husband for this one. When the day comes that I am no longer enamoured of Mr. O, I will put this list out to pasture.